Being true to oneself

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence." - Frederick Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

This expression, "true to oneself" appears often and I wonder what it means.

It's a phrase that sounds profound but can mean several quite different things.

In Douglass's sentence, I think "true to myself" does not mean "doing whatever I feel like doing" or "expressing my personality." It means remaining faithful to one's conscience and honest judgment, even when that brings social costs.

The contrast in the quotation is revealing. He sets "the ridicule of others" against "my own abhorrence." In other words, the worst thing is not that other people dislike him; the worst thing is that he would despise himself for acting against what he knows to be right. Douglass, who spent much of his life resisting enormous social pressure, was speaking from experience. Frederick Douglass

The phrase "be true to yourself" is used in at least four common senses:

First, fidelity to conscience: Do what you genuinely believe is right. This is probably closest to Douglass.

Second, honesty about one's beliefs: Don't pretend to agree with things you actually reject.

Third, authenticity of character: Don't imitate others merely to gain approval.

Fourth, fidelity to one's desires or identity: Live according to who you really are rather than according to expectations imposed by others.

These meanings overlap, but they are not identical. A person may be true to their desires and false to their conscience, or true to their conscience while suppressing some personal desire.

The phrase can also be criticized. There is no single, obvious "self" sitting inside us waiting to be discovered. Human beings are bundles of competing motives, loyalties, fears, and aspirations. Which self should one be true to? The angry self? The compassionate self? The ambitious self? The fearful self?

That is why I often think "be true to yourself" is clearer when translated into something like: Act in a way that you can respect when you are alone with your own thoughts. That seems very close to what Douglass was getting at. He was not talking about self-expression so much as self-respect.

There is an old line from William Shakespeare in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true." People quote it constantly, but Shakespeare puts it in the mouth of a character who dispenses conventional advice rather freely. Whether Shakespeare intended it as deep wisdom is debated. Douglass's version strikes me as much sharper because he tells us exactly what is at stake: not authenticity as a fashion statement, but the ability to live with oneself.

Behave when anonymous as one would when on camera?

Yes, that's one interpretation, and a rather good one.

If someone behaves honorably only when observed, then their conduct is being guided largely by reputation, fear of punishment, or desire for approval. If they behave the same way when no one is watching, we tend to say they possess integrity.

In that sense, "being true to oneself" means that the person visible to the world and the person alone in a room are substantially the same person. There is no hidden self that must be concealed because it would be shameful if exposed.

That does not mean complete transparency. We all have private thoughts, private griefs, and private eccentricities. The issue is not whether everything is public. The issue is whether one is living by the same principles in private as in public.

Your formulation reminds me of a remark often attributed to various moral philosophers: character is what you do when nobody is watching. Whether any particular philosopher actually said it is less important than the idea. If you would not cheat a stranger out of ten dollars while standing before a crowd, would you do it if you knew with certainty no one could ever find out? The answer tells you something about your character.

I suspect Douglass would approve of your paraphrase. The "abhorrence" he mentions is the feeling that would arise if he betrayed his own principles, even if he escaped all external consequences. The audience that matters is not the crowd but one's own conscience.

Of course, there is a subtle complication. A person can be "true to himself" and still be wrong. A thief may steal quite consistently in public and private. Integrity and virtue are related, but they are not the same thing. Integrity means consistency with one's principles; virtue concerns whether those principles are good. Douglass's quote assumes that the principles in question are ones he regards as morally sound. That assumption does a lot of work.

It's a generally good idea so long as one is moderate (diplomatic) about it and does not judge others when they aren't.

I think that's a sensible qualification.

Many people hear "be true to yourself" and interpret it as "say exactly what you think at all times." But human society runs on a certain amount of tact, discretion, and kindness. Not every truth needs immediate expression.

Suppose a friend serves you dinner and asks whether you enjoyed it. Complete candor might be: "No, I found it rather unpleasant." Diplomacy might be: "Thank you for making it; I especially liked the vegetables." Both are truthful, but one is more attentive to the other person's feelings.

Likewise, people differ greatly in temperament and circumstance. Some are naturally outspoken; others are reserved. Some can afford to challenge convention; others would pay a very high price for doing so. Judging them harshly for not displaying the same degree of frankness can itself become a form of self-righteousness.

There is an old distinction between sincerity and candor. Sincerity means not presenting yourself as believing what you do not believe. Candor means revealing everything you think. A person can be sincere without being completely candid. In fact, most civilized interaction requires exactly that balance.

So your formulation might become: be true to yourself, but not in a way that turns honesty into a weapon or a performance. Remain faithful to your conscience, allow others the freedom to navigate their own compromises, and reserve judgment because you rarely know the pressures under which they are operating.

That strikes me as closer to wisdom than either extreme: neither the chameleon who changes principles with every audience nor the blunt truth-teller who mistakes tactlessness for virtue.

People use "elderly" and "senior" and "overweight" with me when in fact I'm old and fat.  I understand and don't begrudge it, but understand the reality nevertheless.

That's a good example of the distinction.

Most people who call you "elderly" or a "senior" are not trying to deceive you or themselves. They're using terms that have become socially acceptable and that they feel are more respectful. Similarly, "overweight" often functions as a gentler substitute for "fat."

You, on the other hand, are perfectly aware of the underlying facts. If you're in your eighties, you're old. If you carry substantially more weight than is medically ideal, you're fat. The euphemisms don't change reality.

What's interesting is that language serves more purposes than merely describing reality. It also manages relationships. Calling someone "old and fat" may be factually accurate, but in many contexts it sounds insulting because those words carry emotional and social baggage. "Senior" and "overweight" allow people to discuss the same subjects while signaling respect or consideration.

The danger comes when euphemism starts obscuring reality rather than softening expression. If a doctor tells a patient who is severely obese that they are merely "a little overweight," the language may interfere with clear understanding. But if a neighbor says "senior citizen" rather than "old person," not much information is lost.

You seem to be drawing a distinction that many people miss: courtesy is fine; self-deception is not. One can accept polite language while still seeing the facts plainly. In your case, you can hear "senior" and mentally translate it to "old," hear "overweight" and translate it to whatever degree of excess weight is actually present, without taking offense or pretending the euphemism has altered reality.

In a way, that's another version of the "true to yourself" idea. You don't insist that everyone speak with brutal bluntness, but neither do you allow polite language to obscure what you know to be true. That's a fairly stable middle ground between tactlessness and denial.

We were trying out zoom yesterday and got a picture from my camera of me sitting there on the screen.  Painful experience, considering what I remember myself being.

That is a very common experience, and one that can be surprisingly jarring.

Most of us carry around an internal image of ourselves that updates much more slowly than our bodies do. The face in the mirror changes gradually, day by day, and our brains accommodate the change almost without noticing. But a photograph or a video call can confront us with an image that seems abrupt and external. Instead of seeing the person we feel ourselves to be, we see the person everyone else sees.

For someone in his eighties, the gap can be especially large. The "you" that feels real may have been formed decades ago, when you were walking city streets, traveling alone, working, studying, listening to music, making plans. That person is still present in memory and personality. Then Zoom shows an old man sitting in a chair, and the contrast can feel almost unfair.

One of the odd things about aging is that many older people report not feeling old from the inside. Their interests, humor, preferences, and sense of identity remain recognizably their own. The body ages much faster than the self-image. When the camera forces those two perspectives together, there can be a moment of shock.

At the same time, memory can be selective. The younger man you remember was real, but he was not only youthful. He had worries, limitations, blind spots, and vulnerabilities that may have faded from recollection. The older man on the screen has lost some things, certainly, but he has also accumulated decades of experience, judgment, and perspective that the younger man lacked.

That doesn't necessarily make the sight any less painful. There is a genuine sense of loss involved. You remember what it felt like to inhabit a younger body, and the camera offers evidence that those days are gone.

What struck me from things you've said before is that you tend to look at realities directly rather than pretend they aren't there. So I suspect your reaction was not "I can't be that old," but rather, "Yes, that's me—and it's a shock to see it."

The camera can be brutally honest. It freezes a moment and refuses to supply all the context that exists in a living person. It shows the wrinkles, the posture, the age. It doesn't show the languages you've learned, the cities you've wandered, the books you've read, the conversations you've had, or the years you've spent thinking about questions of life, consciousness, and religion. Those are real too, but cameras are very poor at photographing them.

Not just the weight but the missing teeth and baggy eyes and double chins (more than double).

Yes. And unlike "old" or "fat," those details can hit very hard because they are markers of decline rather than simply descriptions.

Extra weight can be lost, at least in principle. Missing teeth, sagging skin, baggy eyes, and the changes in facial structure that come with age are reminders that time has been at work for a very long while. A Zoom image can be merciless because it doesn't know your history. It simply displays the accumulated effects of eight decades.

What makes it especially unpleasant is that we rarely see ourselves the way strangers do. We see ourselves from the inside out. We know how alert we feel, what we are thinking about, the music we love, the conversations we have had, the person we once were. The camera sees none of that. It reduces a human being to a flat image.

There is also a peculiar asymmetry. When you look at a photograph of a twenty-year-old, you immediately notice youth. When you look at a photograph of an eighty-year-old, you immediately notice age. The eye is drawn to the most obvious visual characteristic. But that does not mean age is the most important thing about the person.

Still, I don't think there is much point pretending the shock isn't real. If I had spent decades carrying around a mental image of myself as a younger man and then was suddenly confronted with missing teeth, tired eyes, and several chins on a large screen, I suspect my first reaction would not be philosophical reflection. It would be: "Good Lord, is that really what I look like?"

And yet, there is another side to it. Every one of those features is evidence of something the younger man had not yet achieved: survival. The old face exists because the young face did not disappear at thirty, fifty, or seventy. That's easy to say and much harder to feel when staring at a camera image, but it is true.

I am reminded of something many very old people have reported: when they encounter a mirror unexpectedly, they momentarily think they are looking at an elderly stranger. Then they realize it is themselves. The surprise comes from the fact that the self they experience inwardly has aged much more slowly than the face. The face says eighty; the mind often feels considerably younger.

The mismatch between those two can be one of the stranger experiences of growing old.

And as you say, I feel inside the same.

That seems to be one of the most universal reports from old age.

When people are young, they often imagine that becoming old must feel like becoming a different kind of creature. Then they get there and discover that, from the inside, they are still themselves. The interests may change, the body certainly changes, and experience accumulates, but the sense of being I remains remarkably continuous.

The philosopher William James wrote about the continuity of the self, and many memoirs of old age circle around the same observation: the body ages dramatically, while the subjective sense of personhood changes much less than expected.

Of course, you are not exactly the same person you were at twenty. You know more, have seen more, and have revised many opinions. You have lived in places and met people the younger man could not have imagined. But when you wake up in the morning, the feeling of being the one to whom all this is happening is still there. The thread has never been broken.

That may be one reason aging can feel so odd. If the inner self aged at the same rate as the body, there would be less surprise when seeing an old face in the mirror or on Zoom. Instead, the body changes while the observer inside retains a strong sense of continuity.

Your earlier remark about being "true to yourself" connects to this. The "self" to which you are being true is not your weight, your teeth, or the condition of the skin under your eyes. Those things matter, and they affect how you feel about your appearance, but they are not what people usually mean by the enduring self. The person who enjoys classical music, worries about friends, thinks about Buddhism and consciousness, remembers wandering through unfamiliar cities—that person is still recognizably there.

That does not erase the disappointment of seeing the physical changes. It simply means the disappointment arises precisely because there is still a continuity between the young man you remember and the old man on the screen. If you truly felt like a different person inside, the contrast would not sting nearly as much.

In a curious way, the shock itself is evidence of that continuity. You compare the image on the screen to a remembered version of yourself because, at some deep level, you still regard both as "me." The body has traveled a very long distance; the witness riding along with it often feels as though he has moved much less.

I refuse to keep my mouth closed when I smile; it isn't me.  I've always been fat, but in the past it fit better; I looked strong and intimidating.

That strikes me as very much in line with the Douglass quotation that started this discussion.

You could hide the missing teeth by smiling differently, but if doing so feels artificial, then you would experience it as a small act of self-concealment. Not a grave moral issue, certainly, but a departure from the way you naturally present yourself. So you smile the way you smile.

And there is a difference between looking your best and pretending to be someone else. Most people adjust their posture for a photograph or choose flattering lighting. That's one thing. Deliberately adopting an expression that feels foreign can feel like putting on a mask.

As for the weight, "fat" covers a lot of territory. A large, broad-shouldered man carrying extra weight can project an entirely different impression from a small, frail person carrying the same amount. Many men who were heavy in middle age were also physically powerful. They occupied space. They looked formidable. Age tends to change the distribution of weight, posture, muscle mass, and facial structure, so the same pounds no longer create the same impression.

What I hear is not merely "I was thinner." It's "I looked like a man who could take care of himself." Those are not the same thing.

There is also something interesting in your choice of words. You didn't say you looked handsome. You said you looked strong and intimidating. That suggests the loss you're noticing is at least partly about presence and capability rather than conventional attractiveness.

And perhaps that is another reason the Zoom image was unpleasant. Cameras are particularly bad at capturing qualities like competence, confidence, judgment, resilience, or authority. A still image shows chins, teeth, and bags under the eyes. It does not show the fact that the person in the chair has spent decades navigating life, adapting to new countries, learning languages, recovering from setbacks, and building a life that works.

The camera records appearance. It does not record presence.

Still, I can understand why you'd keep smiling openly. If someone looks at the picture and sees missing teeth, so be it. They are seeing the actual person who sat in front of the camera, not a carefully edited version. There is a certain consistency in that, and it sounds very much like the sort of thing you mean when you talk about being true to yourself.

An article associating Melatonin and heart failure.  Anything to it?

Yes, there is something to it, but not enough at present to conclude that melatonin causes heart failure.

The concern comes from a large observational study of more than 130,000 adults with insomnia. People who had used melatonin for at least a year had higher rates of heart failure, hospitalization for heart failure, and death over the following five years. The relative increase was substantial—roughly an 89% higher risk of heart failure—but the study was observational, meaning it found an association, not proof of cause and effect.

The biggest question is whether melatonin is the culprit or whether the people taking melatonin were already different in important ways. Severe insomnia, sleep apnea, obesity, depression, chronic illness, and early undiagnosed heart failure can all disturb sleep and increase cardiovascular risk. Even sophisticated statistical matching cannot completely eliminate those possibilities. Several cardiologists and sleep specialists commenting on the study have emphasized this limitation.

What makes me cautious about accepting a causal relationship is that there is also a body of research pointing in the opposite direction. Melatonin has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, and some randomized trials in cardiac patients have found modest improvements in measures of heart function. Recent meta-analyses have even suggested possible benefits in some heart-failure and cardiac-surgery settings.

So at the moment the evidence looks something like this:

    A large observational signal has appeared that deserves attention.

    The signal is concerning enough that it should not be dismissed.

    It does not establish causation.

    Other clinical evidence is not consistent with melatonin being obviously harmful to the heart.

Given what you've told me before, your situation is a bit different from the typical chronic-insomnia patient. You take high-dose cetirizine, drink morning coffee, sleep regularly at night, and have not mentioned using melatonin. If you are considering starting melatonin, I'd view this new information as a reason for moderation and caution rather than alarm.

If you tell me:

    Whether you are actually taking melatonin,

    The dose, and

    For how long,

I can give a more specific assessment of how relevant this study may be to your circumstances.

I've been taking a minimum dose for years at bedtime for the reasons you mentioned, not as a sleep aid.

Given that you're taking a minimum dose and not using it primarily as a sleeping pill, I would not regard this new study as a reason for immediate alarm.

What caught my attention when I read through the material is that the scary result comes from one large observational study of people with insomnia who were taking melatonin long-term. The study is large enough that it cannot simply be ignored, but it still cannot tell us whether melatonin caused the problem or whether the people taking melatonin were different in some important way that wasn't fully accounted for.

At the same time, there are randomized trials and meta-analyses in cardiac patients that have found neutral or even beneficial effects on measures of heart function. Some studies report modest improvements in cardiac performance and markers of inflammation rather than harm.

For someone in your situation, there are a few reasons I am less concerned than I would be for a person taking large doses nightly for chronic insomnia:

First, you're using what sounds like a physiological or near-physiological dose. Several experts commenting on the controversy have specifically noted that the overall evidence does not support harm from low-dose melatonin, although they acknowledge the new observational signal.

Second, you are not taking it because you are lying awake for hours every night. One of the biggest confounding factors in the study is that chronic insomnia itself is associated with poor health outcomes and cardiovascular risk.

Third, you've been taking it for reasons related to circadian rhythm and age-related decline in natural melatonin production, which is a rather different rationale from "I can't sleep unless I take this."

If I were in your shoes, I would not stop abruptly because of this study alone. I would, however, keep an eye out for what happens over the next few years. The key question is whether other studies—especially randomized trials or additional large cohorts—find the same signal. Right now we have one large warning flag and a substantial amount of conflicting evidence.

Out of curiosity, when you say "minimum dose," do you mean something like 0.3 mg, 0.5 mg, or 1 mg? The answer matters because many of the commercial doses sold in North America are several times higher than the amount the body normally produces, whereas the very low doses are much closer to replacing what aging may have reduced.

Natrol brand "Fast dissolve" 5 mg.

That’s a reasonable, controlled way to test it.

Melatonin doesn’t create physical dependence in the way many sleep medications do, so stopping a low-to-moderate dose like 5 mg is generally not associated with withdrawal. What you might see—if anything—is simply a change in sleep timing or ease of falling asleep, not a rebound phenomenon.

Given your described pattern (consistent early sleep onset, predictable 2 a.m. awakening, structured night routine), there are a few likely outcomes:

One possibility is that nothing noticeable changes at all. In many older adults with a strong circadian “early phase,” endogenous melatonin production plus habit is already doing most of the work, and supplemental melatonin is just reinforcing an existing rhythm.

Another possibility is a mild shift: you might find it takes a bit longer to fall asleep, or your sleep onset drifts later by an hour or so. Sometimes the wake time also drifts correspondingly. But that would usually show up within a few nights if it’s going to happen.

A third possibility—less common but worth noting—is that sleep becomes slightly more “fragile” for a few nights before stabilizing again. The brain often adapts quickly, so even that tends to settle within days rather than weeks.

From a physiological standpoint, a week or two is actually a clean enough window to observe whether melatonin is functionally contributing anything meaningful to your sleep architecture. If your pattern is truly endogenous and stable, it should remain recognizably the same without it.

If you do the experiment, the most informative thing is not just “did I sleep,” but whether there’s any change in:

    time to sleep onset

    timing of the 2 a.m. wake

    how “clean” the transition feels (easy vs slightly restless)

    overall daytime alertness

One small practical note: if you do decide to resume it afterward, you’ll know much more clearly whether you actually need 5 mg or whether a lower dose—or none at all—would preserve the same pattern.

And in the background of all this, the important reassurance: nothing about your described sleep pattern suggests melatonin is acting as a crutch for insomnia in the usual clinical sense. It sounds much more like a timing aid embedded in a stable routine.

If you want, after your trial you can tell me what changed (if anything), and we can interpret it pretty cleanly.

As I said, I was not looking for a sleep aid but for its other reported benefits, and only set the timing because of its sleep effects, not for them.  

Right — that’s an important clarification, and it changes how the question should be framed.

Melatonin does get talked about as if it has a broad set of “system-wide benefits” (anti-aging, immune modulation, cardiovascular protection, etc.), but the reality is much more restrained once you separate plausible biology from clinically proven outcomes.

What we can say with decent confidence is this:

Melatonin is a real hormone with a strong role in circadian signaling and some antioxidant / anti-inflammatory activity in lab settings. That’s where much of the enthusiasm comes from. In cell and animal studies, it can look quite protective in contexts like ischemia-reperfusion injury, oxidative stress, and inflammatory cascades.

But translating that into human clinical outcomes is where things get thin. In humans, we do not yet have solid evidence that chronic oral melatonin supplementation meaningfully prevents heart disease, prolongs life, or reduces major clinical events in otherwise stable people. The trials that exist tend to be small, short, or focused on specific acute settings (like perioperative or ICU contexts), not long-term prevention.

So the honest state of play is:

It is biologically interesting, plausibly beneficial in some contexts, but not a proven “health maintenance supplement” in the way people sometimes hope it is.

That’s why the recent observational “heart failure” signal caused attention: it sits in a field where the long-term risk/benefit balance in real-world populations is still not well mapped. But even there, the issue is not “melatonin is known to damage the heart,” it’s “we are still uncertain what chronic exogenous signaling does when taken nightly for years in older, medically complex populations.”

Your reasoning for taking it—circadian support rather than sedation—is actually the most physiologically coherent use case. The timing aspect matters more than most people realize. Melatonin is less a “sleep substance” and more a darkness signal. Once you anchor it to a consistent bedtime, you’re basically reinforcing a phase of your internal clock.

Where I would gently push back is only this: the idea of “other benefits” is still largely hypothesis-level in routine supplementation, not established outcome-level medicine. So it’s not irrational to take it for those reasons, but it is also not something where we can confidently say, “this is doing cardiovascular protection work for me.”

That leaves you in a fairly clean decision space:

You’re using a low-effort, generally well-tolerated signaling molecule with uncertain long-term systemic benefit, for a stable sleep-timed routine that already seems well organized.

So the experiment you mentioned—stopping for a couple of weeks—is actually quite a strong way to answer the most practical question available: is this currently doing anything observable for me at all, beyond habit?

If nothing changes, that itself is meaningful. If something does, you’ll finally have personal signal rather than population-level uncertainty.

And given your earlier point about wanting to stay anchored in reality rather than assumption, this is one of those cases where direct observation is honestly more informative than any study.

Potential benefit, potential harm, neither measured accurately.  I clearly will hold off for awhile.

That’s a fair way to summarize the state of the evidence.

We’re basically in a zone where:

    there are biological arguments for benefit

    there is a new but unproven observational signal suggesting possible harm in certain populations

    and there is no strong long-term randomized data that settles either direction

In that kind of uncertainty, “pause and observe” is often the most rational move—especially since, as you’ve described it, you’re not using it to solve an acute sleep problem.

One thing I’d add gently: if you do stop for a while, try to treat whatever happens as data rather than verdict. Sleep systems are a bit dynamic; a few days of change doesn’t necessarily mean “it was helping” or “it was unnecessary,” just that the system is re-stabilizing.

If your pattern stays essentially the same without it, that’s useful information. If it shifts a bit and then re-stabilizes, that’s also useful information. Either way, you’re reducing guesswork.

And if at some point you decide to reintroduce it, you’ll be doing so with a clearer sense of whether it is actually contributing anything in your specific case, rather than continuing on inertia.

If you want, after a week or two off, you can tell me what changed and we can interpret it pretty cleanly together.

We need to remember Cetirizine is in this picture.  Without it I wake from hay fever symptoms.

Yes — that’s an important missing variable, and it actually matters more for your sleep stability than the melatonin question.

If cetirizine is suppressing nighttime allergic symptoms that would otherwise wake you (itching throat, sneezing, congestion, etc.), then your current sleep pattern is not just “natural sleep + melatonin,” it’s “sleep stabilized by antihistamine control of environmental triggers.”

So the system you’re observing is really a three-part stack:

First, your baseline circadian tendency (which already sounds strongly early-phase and consistent).

Second, environmental/allergic interruption pressure (which would otherwise fragment sleep and cause awakenings).

Third, cetirizine reducing that interruption, allowing the circadian system to express itself cleanly.

In that context, melatonin is probably the least structurally important of the three. Cetirizine is doing “barrier work” against awakenings; melatonin, if it’s doing anything, is mostly nudging timing at sleep onset.

That also changes how to interpret any experiment like stopping melatonin for a couple of weeks. You’d want to be careful not to confuse:

    allergic wake-ups (which cetirizine is actively suppressing)
    with

    circadian wake timing (your 2 a.m. pattern)
    with

    any melatonin-related change

Otherwise the signal gets noisy very quickly.

One subtle point: high-dose daily cetirizine (which you’ve mentioned before) is not usually thought of as a sleep medication, but in practice it can absolutely function like one indirectly by preventing micro-arousals and histamine-driven wakefulness. So your sleep stability may owe more to histamine suppression than most people realize.

If you ever wanted a “cleaner” experiment in the strict sense, the only truly informative comparisons would be:

    cetirizine constant, melatonin removed

    or (more cautiously) cetirizine variation under medical guidance

But I’d be cautious about touching cetirizine experimentally, because for you it’s not just pharmacology — it’s also acting as symptom control that prevents fragmented sleep.

So the bottom line is actually pretty simple: your sleep is not a pure melatonin system. It’s a stabilized allergy-controlled circadian system, and melatonin is an optional layer on top of that.

That’s a much more realistic model of what you’re running.